Picture this.
You’re across the table from someone you care about, a sister, best friend, or partner.
Somehow, you both needle each other.
Tension thickens, like an overcooked casserole hijacks dinner.
Defenses go up, brick by brick.
Still, you throw words anyway.
Step back.
It’s almost hilarious.
Looking from above, as your wiser self, you can see the absurdity.
You’re both pleading for the same thing: “Listen to me. Respect me. Let’s not blow this up.”
Yet nobody hears the other.
It’s like playing tennis with no ball.
You just keep swinging, digging in your heels like everything rides on this.
Here’s the truth...
It’s never really about the thing, which is usually something petty, like where to put the keys.
Touch someone’s beliefs, and something ancient detonates.
Suddenly, it’s not about the dishwasher, it’s about defending your very existence.
The core you.
The one who loves pineapple on pizza, or hates it, and won’t budge.
This plays out everywhere.
At home or at work; all are trying for the same win, but every meeting turns into a turf brawl.
Online, people who basically agree fight over one off-key sentence.
Politics explodes.
Thanksgiving dinner? Demolition derby.
Nobody remembers what set it off.
We try everything: workshops, therapy, building exercises, flowcharts.
Maybe things improve for a week or a month.
Then the same fight returns in a new disguise.
It drains you.
No matter how many tools you load up, you’re bailing out a sinking boat with Band-Aids.
But there’s a reason these messes keep coming back.
And it’s never what you think.
The Pattern Nobody Names
Most fixes target symptoms; the arguments, anxiety, office drama, holiday blowups, even the abusive and harmful behavior.
They’re touted as smart painkillers.
The sting may fade, but the root keeps gnawing.
And even locking people up still only deals with the symptom.
Every time life devolves into familiar friction, everyone makes the same blunder.
Not a tragedy.
Not stupidity.
Just a hardwired way of seeing the world that's so normal you miss it.
The blunder?
We go through life seeing ourselves as separate; from each other, the world, anything bigger than what’s inside our heads.
You don’t learn this from a single incident.
It comes baked in.
From the moment you realize you’re a person, the “me” story starts building itself.
Culture, school, family, society, all pile it on.
You shape yourself by what makes you NOT everyone else, which is great for expressing your uniqueness.
“I’m the artsy one.”
“I’m not like them.”
“I believe this, not that.”
Yet you can also be drawing lines, building walls.
Soon, you’re boxed in perceptually, appearing separate, not connected with anything.
It sneaks up on you.
Nobody decides, “Today, I chop myself off.”
You just wake up, years later, boxed in behind a hundred invisible fences.
And because everyone does it, this passes for reality, when it’s really just a warped pair of filtering glasses we’re looking at life through.
What Changes When You Notice
When you see this pattern, not as law, but as habit... things sharpen.
Nothing gets worse.
You just finally name what’s always brewed under the surface.
You notice it inside yourself.
That instant urge to throw up shields when someone disagrees.
The brain’s little tic of ranking everyone by who’s cool, who’s a drag, who you wish would disappear from the next Zoom call.
You start wheeling and dealing: “I’m nice if they are. I listen if I don’t have to wrestle. I respect them, unless they bulldoze my line.”
Then you see it in the larger machinery.
Economies run on the story that everyone’s a greedy gremlin scrapping for crumbs.
Politics survives by flattening the other side.
The media feeds on division because it banks from eyeballs and clicks.
Schools sort kids into piles instead of showing them how to belong.
Nobody invented this.
It happens because billions trip on the same blind spot: “I’m over here, you’re over there.”
Systems mirror the people who build them.
Spot this pattern, really see it and the system bends, too.
The point with this is to be practical, not merely some “we are the world” fluff with no behavioral action with it.
If your problem keeps coming back, you’re papering over symptoms, not hitting the root.
The real cause?
A reflex in how we scan reality.
And reflexes, even gnarly ones, can be seen, poked, rewired.
Why I’ve Spent Decades On This
Here’s the deal.
I’m John Halderman.
I’ve spent over 55 years poking at the mystery: “How does life work and what can we do with it?”
I've delved into multiple disciplines: psychology, philosophy, brain science, spirituality.
Every field gives me a piece, yet none shows the whole of it.
Early on, I wondered: is there something underneath it all?
Not whose camp is “right,” but what sits at the core?
Like six blind folks groping an elephant, where everyone grabs a different part, and nobody sees the full picture.
Thirty years ago, after waking suddenly from a lucid dream, something clicked.
I scribbled a complete framework as fast as I could draw and write.
One detailed mind map, a vast blueprint.
The core: the colossal human error is thinking we’re separate from each other.
The fix is realizing we’re innately interconnected.
Everything else is an erroneous perception.
I kept digging deeper and wider for the common threads.
Every year, the same pattern reappears.
We aren’t doomed to conflict.
We just run this particular brain app, one that can be updated or even deleted.
Now, decades on, I’ve written a book.
It drills into how the whole erroneous separation perception works, where it starts, what it wrecks, and what unlocks when you see past it.
The book’s nearly ready.
I wrote the book to help readers get a better grasp on our innate interconnectedness, I'll even say, our basic human nature.
But honestly, the book just fires the starting gun.
These ideas don’t exist to gather dust, they’re for living, testing, arguing, laughing over.
At home, at work, in every sticky standoff.
Which brings me to this newsletter.
What You’ll Find Here
My agenda:
I’ll riff on every corner of life where this “separateness” illusion creeps in, and what flips once you spot it.
Sometimes we dive deep.
Sometimes, it’s pure practicality.
I mix stories, big swings, real-world scrapes, some science, spirituality, and a dash of what may be termed as woo-woo.
No belief required... and they can tend to be a hindrance when looking around at things that you don't currently understand.
Just look for yourself, mess with it, see what rattles.
When you can say "that's interesting" more than "no way," you just might see how the threads connect.
If you’ve blown through every self-help trick and life still feels like a tight shoe, there’s a reason.
You’re not broken.
Those fixes were ointment on a rash, not a root cure.
This newsletter swings at the root.
Glad you’re here.
— John Halderman
Living Unity Consciousness
Be The Change...
...Together We Are The Shift
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